Stratcom, the U.S. Strategic Command charged with, among other things, ensuring that we dominate the heavens, and the newest of all the “geographic” commands, Cybercom, which oversees “1,000 elite military hackers and spies under one four-star general,” all prepared to engage in preemptive war in cyberspace.
Some of these commands have crept up on us over the years. Centcom, which now oversees our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, was formed in 1983, a result of the Carter Doctrine—that is, of President Jimmy Carter’s decision to make the protection of Persian Gulf oil a military necessity, while both Northcom (2002) and Africom (2007) were creations of the Global War on Terror (GWOT).
From a mapping perspective, however, the salient point is simple enough: at the moment, there is no imaginable space on or off the planet that is not an “area of responsibility” for the U.S. military. That, not the protection of our shores and borders, is what is now meant by the word “defense” in the Department of Defense. And if you were to stare at that map for a while, I can’t help but think it would come to strike you as abidingly strange. No place at all of no military interest to us? What does that say about our country—and us?
In case you think the map I’ve just described is cartographic hyperbole, consider this: we now have what is, in essence, a secret military inside the U.S. military. I’m talking about our special operations forces. These elite and largely covert forces were rapidly expanded in the Bush years as part of the Global War on Terror, but also thanks to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s urge to bring covert activities that were once the province of the CIA under the Pentagon’s wing.
By the end of George W. Bush’s second term in office, special operations forces were fighting in, training in, or stationed in approximately sixty countries under the aegis of the Global War on Terror. Less than two years later, according to the
And talking about what the Pentagon has taken under its wing, I’m reminded of a low-budget sci-fi film of my childhood,
You might wonder what kind of “intelligence” a country could possibly get from seventeen competing, bickering outfits—and that’s not even the half of it. According to a
In all, at least 263 organizations have been created or reorganized as a response to 9/11…. Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States…. In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings—about 17 million square feet of space.
And keep in mind that more than two-thirds of the IC’s intelligence programs are controlled by the Pentagon, which also means control over a major chunk of the combined intelligence budget, announced at $80 billion (“2 ? times the size it was on Sept. 10, 2001,” according to Priest and Arkin), but undoubtedly far larger.
And when it comes to the Pentagon, that’s just a start. Massive expansion in all directions has been its modus operandi since 9/11. Its soaring budget hit about $700 billion for fiscal year 2010 (when you include a war- fighting supplemental bill of $33 billion)—an increase of
Not surprisingly, the Pentagon has taken over a spectrum of previously State Department–controlled civilian activities, ranging from humanitarian relief and development (also known as “nation building”) to actual diplomacy. And don’t forget its growing roles as a domestic-disaster manager and a global arms dealer. You could certainly think of the Pentagon as the blob on the American horizon, and yet, looking around, you might hardly be aware of the ways in which your country continues to be militarized.
With that in mind, let’s examine another warscape, particularly appropriate at a moment when numerous commentators are pointing out how the United States is morphing from a can-do into a can’t-do nation, when the headlines are filled with exploding gas lines and grim reports on the country’s aging infrastructure. Still, don’t think that the old can-do American spirit of my childhood is dead. Quite the contrary, we still have our great building projects, our equivalents of pyramids and ziggurats—and in some cases we even build them near the ruins of actual ziggurats and pyramids. I’m talking about our military bases, especially those being constructed in our war zones.
No sooner had U.S. troops taken Baghdad in April 2003 than the Pentagon and the crony corporations it now can’t go to war without began to pour billions of taxpayer dollars into the construction of well-fortified American towns in Iraq that included multiple bus routes, PXs, fast-food joints, massage parlors, Internet cafes, power plants, water-treatment plants, fire stations, sewage plants, you name it.
Hundreds of military bases, micro to mega, were built in Iraq alone, including the ill-named but enormous Victory Base Complex at the edge of Baghdad International Airport, with at least nine significant sub-bases nestled inside it, and Balad Air Base, which—sooner than you could say “Saddam Hussein’s in captivity”—was handling air traffic on the scale of O’Hare International in Chicago, and bedding down forty thousand inhabitants, including hire- a-gun African cops, civilian defense employees, special ops forces, employees of private contractors, and tons of troops.
And all of this was nothing compared to the feat the Pentagon accomplished in Afghanistan, where the U.S. military now claims to have built four hundred bases of every sort from the smallest combat outposts to monster installations like Bagram Air Base. In a country without normal resources, adequate fuel, or much of anything else, just about all construction materials for those bases and the fuel to go with them had to be delivered over treacherous supply lines thousands of miles long—so treacherous and difficult, in fact, that, by the time a gallon of fuel reaches Afghanistan to keep our Humvees and Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles rolling along, it’s estimated to cost at least $400.
Of course, whatever skills we may lack when it comes to predicting the future, all things must end, including the American war state and our strange state of war. The question is: Can our over-armed global mission be radically downsized before it downsizes us? It will happen anyway and it won’t take forever either, not the way things are going, but it will happen in a less harmful way, if you’re involved, in whatever fashion you choose, in making it so. Had I had a birthday cake with candles on it for that ninth birthday of mine and blew them out, that, I think, would have been my wish.
How the Movies Saved My Life
Every childhood has its own geography and every child is an explorer, as daring as any Peary or Amundsen or Scott. I was the mildest of children, such a picky eater that my parents called me a “quince” (a fruit sour enough, they insisted, to make your face pucker, as mine did when challenged by any food out of the ordinary). I was neither a daredevil nor a chance-taker, and by my teens scorned myself for being so boringly on the straight and narrow. I never raced a car, or mocked a cop, or lit out for the territories.
Still, by the luck of the draw, as a child of the 1950s, I was plunged into a landscape more exotic than most American kids could then have imagined. It was still devastated by war, populated to a startling extent by present and former enemies, and most amazingly, the Germans, Japanese, Italians, and Russians (not to speak of the
